Exploring Language of Psychology in Journal Articles and Popularized Online Texts: Does Audience Make a Difference?

Scholars have investigated how authors structure their messages according to their communicative purposes and their intended audience. This article examines whether English research articles (RAs) and popularized texts (PTs) as representations of two different communication purposes and target audiences utilize distinct lexicogrammatical features. The corpus comprised English research articles and science popularized texts in psychology. We examined the distribution of lexicogrammatical features indicating interpersonal and social relationships. The findings indicate that the distribution of linguistic features is different across these two genres. The findings promise implications for writers of online psychology texts and call for further research on psychology texts.